The ZYNQ system architecture is composed of two main parts: the Processing System (PS) and the Programmable Logic (PL). These two components are electrically isolated, allowing the PS and PL to be used separately, with unused components being turned off to reduce power consumption. However, the most valuable feature of ZYNQ is when the two components are used together in conjunction.
The Processing System (PS)
The processing system is based on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, which is a dedicated and optimized physical component on the chip. This 'hard' processor is optimized for high performance and is physically embedded on the chip.
In addition to the 'hard' processor, there is also a 'soft' processor option, such as MicroBlaze, which is a processor that is composed of programmable logic units (PL) and is equivalent to the hardware 'hard' processor. Compared to the 'hard' processor, the 'soft' processor has more flexibility in terms of implementation and number of processing units.
It is worth noting that multiple MicroBlaze 'soft' processors can be allocated on the PL side to work collaboratively with the 'hard' processor. For example, the 'soft' processor can take charge of coordinating low-level tasks and interactions between systems, freeing up tasks of low complexity from the 'hard' processor, thus increasing overall performance.
In addition to the ARM processor, the PS part also includes a set of related processing resources that form an Application Processing Unit (APU), including expansion external interfaces, cache memory, memory interface, interconnect interface, and clock generation circuitry.
The Programmable Logic (PL)
The logical part of ZYNQ is based on Artix7 and Kintex7 FPGA components.
In the logic part, the CLB (Configurable Logic Block) is an arrayed two-dimensional unit of logic resources. Each CLB contains a 2-LUT (Look-Up Table) that can be used for implementing any logic function, a Flip-Flop, a switch matrix, and a carry logic unit for passing signals between adjacent slices.